Keeping Time

On Learning to Stay

The first time I met Tara in person, she greeted me at the airport with a hug without hesitation. Until that moment, we had only known each other through words. It was a hot summer day in Ohio, a place I had never been to before, and I had arrived with my young daughter in tow, trusting sentences I had read on a screen enough to get on a plane. Tara gathered us in as if this were the most natural thing in the world.

She brought us to her home, a small house with a wide front porch and a bench swing that invited staying. We spent hours there, drinking iced tea, the swing moving gently as we talked. We talked about education, about art and literature, about spirituality and motherhood. We did not waste time on small talk. Conversation with Tara felt like rest. Our friendship had begun about a year earlier, in 2007, through blogging. At the time, blogging was still new and unpolished, a place where women wrote their lives as they were living them. We were both writing about Waldorf education and how it shaped our lives as mothers. She lived across the country from me, with a daughter slightly older than mine, and yet our words recognized each other quickly. What began online became, after that visit, something settled and sure.

After I returned home, the friendship deepened. We continued to write publicly, but we also began writing letters. Real letters, handwritten and slow. I loved seeing her handwriting in the mailbox. I loved the discipline of writing back, knowing my words would be read with care. Tara read my writing as if it mattered. She did not flatter. She paid attention. Over time, she became one of my strongest encouragers, one of the first people to tell me I should write a book. Her confidence in me was steady and unforced. It asked me to trust what had already been given.

A few years later, Tara was diagnosed with cancer. She did not respond by narrowing her life. She changed careers, leaving graphic design to care for elderly people. It was clear that helping others was where her energy gathered. She also joined a dragon boat team made up of cancer survivors and wrote beautifully about the experience. She went into remission, and then, some years later, the cancer returned.

The last time I saw her, she was still part of the team. She was no longer rowing. She was the drummer, keeping time for the others. Her body was frail, but her attention was clear. Much of her concern was focused on putting things in order for her family, making sure they would be cared for when she was gone. We talked for hours. We laughed. Even then, conversation with Tara felt like rest.

After she died, something in me would not settle. Her encouragement did not recede with her absence. It became more insistent.

Some encouragement is so faithful that it continues even after death.

I found myself realizing that the kind of writing I longed to do could no longer be postponed. The idea of applying to an undergraduate diploma program in creative writing at Oxford surfaced quietly and would not leave. What stopped me was immediately clear. I was afraid my words would be weighed and found unworthy. I was afraid of hoping for something I wanted so much and then being disappointed.

To apply would mean risking rejection. Not to apply would mean accepting it in advance.

Tara had already weighed my words. She had read them over the years, in blog posts and letters, in fragments and drafts. She had trusted them without needing proof. After her death, I could no longer confuse restraint with wisdom. When I told my husband I was thinking about applying, he listened and said, simply, “Do it!”

Oxford did not feel like ambition. It felt like a response.

During my time there, fear did not disappear. What changed was my relationship to it. I learned to remain faithful to my writing through revision and critique, rather than withdrawing when it felt risky. The work asked for presence, attention, and endurance. That discipline mattered more than outcome. I was no longer writing to be spared disappointment. I was writing to stay.

I finished my program at the University of Oxford last July and attended the awards ceremony a few days ago. Tara has been gone for more than two years now. Standing there in the Sheldonian theater, I felt a clear sense of triumph, not because the path had been easy, but because I had not turned away from it. I had allowed myself to hope, to be read, to be shaped, even when disappointment felt close at hand. As I celebrated that day, I also celebrated my friend. I said thank you for the courage she practiced so faithfully that it continues to live in me.

With love,

Dawn